metapunk

A lot of people on the glorious interwebz have raised issue with the lack of subtlety in James Cameron’s recent film Avatar. It’s a fairly derivative plot, featuring a conflict between a heavily stereo-typed military-industrial complex and a fairly contrived native society (which incidentally, is also the central conflict in Martian Cycles, but hopefully with more depth).  In any case, people have brought up the issue of White Guilt and subtle racism. Now, I’m not disagreeing with these articles, exactly. I just think they’re kind of missing the point.

When viewing a film like Avatar, if you don’t immediately identify with the blue-skinned native Na’vi culture, you may feel like James Cameron is rubbing your face in the sins of the past. Especially since your only other choice is to identify with the vicious and greedy military and corporate white men trying to invade the Na’vi’s home. This of course brings up thoughts about the violent way in which North America was historically seized from its indigenous inhabitants; almost wiping out the natives, and leaving the survivors with serious difficulties.

But people don’t like to be reminded of their mistakes (or the mistakes of their culture), and the common reaction is to direct spite toward the film, or to Cameron, or to Hollywood in general. Kill the messenger (poor quality of the message notwithstanding).

This seems like a pretty useless response. As equally useless as the hand-wringing white guilt that the film seemingly inspires, and which this spite is supposed to protect the audience from.

Sure, historical mistakes were made that can’t be undone, and Avatar kind of hits you over the head with that. But the solution isn’t to look at the film and say “ah, that’s just crap” and search for another source of gratification. The solution is to actually do something about a problem which continues to this day. The colonization of native people never really ended—it’s still going on in many parts of the world, particularly the developing world. Experts estimate that within the lifetime of the current generation, most of these cultures will simply cease to exist.

We may not be able to do much about the past, but we can still do something in the present. We can put pressure on government and business, at home, and abroad, to protect native rights and land claims. We can listen to people like Wade Davis, who recently spoke about the plight of indigenous peoples around the world in the 2009 Massey Lectures (also see TVO video, here).

Let’s realize that indigenous ways of life are valuable and still have much to contribute to humanity, and they’re not just primitive curiosities to be swept aside in the name of progress—and that there is still time to take action, if we could only get over our jaded self-importance, stop criticizing a work of fiction, and stand up for real people right now.

If we can’t do that, then we really haven’t learned anything from history.